Who knew that Walt Disney and Igor Stravinsky clashed over Fantasia? Read on to know more.
10 OCTOBER, 2012
by Maria Popova
On incremental change and “unresisting imbecility.”
As a proponent of
combinatorial creativity and
remix as a tool of innovation, I am always fascinated by how famous creators think about
inspiration,
influence, and
the origin of ideas,
recognizing their combinatorial nature — and how bystander critics
often dismiss these creative transmutations with terms as derisive as
“recreativity.”
Catherine Opie for The New York Times
In a recent
New York Times conversation about their
forthcoming collaborative record celebrating the composer’s 75th birthday,
Philip Glass and
Beck explore the line between mere reworking and originality by way of transformation:
BECK: I love that story you told me, it
was the first time we met, we were talking about the remix project. And
someone had done a cello piece of yours, and then when you went to go
see it, you didn’t recognize it.
GLASS: It was Arthur Russell. And he was a very good cellist.
I was doing a theater piece for the Mabou Mines, it was some Beckett
piece, and I wrote him a cello piece, and he liked the work and was
playing it. And I came back about three months later, and I heard it and
I said, ‘Arthur, that’s beautiful, but what happened to the piece?’ And
he said, ‘No, no, that is what you wrote,’ and I said, ‘Arthur, it’s no
longer what I wrote, it’s your piece now.’ And he thought I was being
upset, he apologized and I said, ‘No, no, no, I think we should put you
down as the composer.’ He had reached the point of transformation. The
incremental changes had turned it into this other thing. I love the fact
that he did that. And I love the fact that he didn’t know that he did
it.
This notion of
iteration and incremental change is, in fact, an essential piece of the
history of innovation — and yet it’s much less glamorous and bombastic than the
Eureka! myth of ideation, which can lead many to dismiss it entirely.
Glass’s remarks reminded me of something I recently read in
Hello Goodbye Hello, the wonderful daisy chain of famous encounters, which recounts a very different reaction another iconic composer,
Igor Stravinsky, had to his music being transformed beyond recognition — by none other than
Walt Disney.
In 1939, at the height of Disney’s success, Walt met Leopold
Stokowski, the conductor of the Philadelphia Orchestra, at a dinner
party. The two became enchanted with each other’s work and the potential
each of their mediums of mastery had for amplifying that of the other,
and began collaborating on a version of Dukas’s
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, starring Mickey Mouse — an idea Disney had been toying with for some time. That’s when Stravinsky steps in:
Disney wants a sequence showing the creation of the
world, full of volcanoes and dinosaurs. But what music to use? His
researchers can only come up with Haydn’s Creation, but Disney thinks it doesn’t carry quite enough oomph. At this point, Stokowski alerts him to Le Sacre du printemps
by Igor Stravinsky. Disney listens to it, and is immediately gripped.
He offers Stravinsky $ 5,000 for the rights, though Stravinsky will
remember it as $ 10,000. According to Stravinsky, Disney hints that if
permission is withheld he will use the music anyway: pre-Revolutionary
Russian copyrights are no longer valid.
Stravinsky accepts; Disney steams ahead. Before long the human
inhabitants of the Burbank studio find themselves working alongside
animals in cages, including iguanas and baby alligators, with skilled
animators studying their movements close-up. ‘It should look as though
the studio has sent an expedition back to the earth six million years
ago,’ enthuses Disney. He is so excited that he starts free-associating
to the music: ‘Something like that last WHAHUMMPH I feel is a volcano –
yet it’s on land. I get that UGHHWAHUMMPH! on land, but we can look out
on the water before this and see water spouts.’ As he listens to the
music, he gets so worked up that he suddenly blurts, ‘Stravinsky will
say: “Jesus, I didn’t know I wrote that music!”’
Which, as it turns out, is roughly what Stravinsky does say. In
December 1939, he drops into the Burbank studio for a private screening
of Fantasia. The experience leaves him with the most awful
memories. ‘I remember someone offering me a score, and when I said I had
my own, that someone saying, “But it is all changed.” It was indeed.
The instrumentation had been improved by such stunts as having the horns
play their glissandi an octave higher in the Danse de la terre.
The order of pieces had been shuffled, too, and the most difficult of
them eliminated, though this did not save the musical performance, which
was execrable.’
So heated was the disagreement and so violent Stravinsky’s outrage,
indeed, that when Disney tried to assuage him by pointing out what a
great number of people would hear his music, the composer famously
grunted:
The numbers of people who consume music … is of no interest to me. The mass adds nothing to art.
Some twenty years later, Stravinsky was still indignant when he and Disney clashed on the pages of
The New York Times about the incident, where the composer called Disney’s transformation of his “Rite of Spring” an “unresisting imbecility.”
Granted, as was likely the case with Disney, not every transformation
improves upon the original or has creative merit. But modern copyright
law — not to mention an unfortunate portion of today’s cultural critique
— continues to err on the side of Stravinsky in an era ripe for the
Glass mindset. To criticize and criminalize transformative creation and
remix is, at best, itself an “unresisting imbecility” and, at worst, an
enormous hindrance to creative innovation.
MICHAL LEVY
